Natural Law in Romans 2:14-15: Tertullian

Now we turn back the clock by a couple of centuries to include a very interesting passage from Tertullian’s De corona militis, written around the turn of the third century. Tertullian emphasizes strongly here that there is a natural order that is naturally perceptible to us even now, in spite of the Devil’s marring of creation. It is available “out there” in the world and “in here” in our hearts. What is perceptible is not only the law-aspect of nature, but the existence, supremacy, goodness, and righteousness of God, nature’s creator and orderer, whom we invoke as judge “according to nature.” Tertullian thus admits of both a natural ethic and a natural theology. We should bear this traditionalist streak in mind when we encounter one of the ubiquitous references to his “Athens/Jerusalem” dichotomy.

Will you therefore seek the law of God (Dei legem)? You have the shared one (communem istam) available publicly in the world (in publico mundi), in the natural tablets to which also the Apostle is accustomed to call attention, as when, in the matter of the veiling of a woman, he says, “Doesn’t nature teach you?”, as when to the Romans, saying that the nations by nature do the things which belong to the law, he suggests both a law that exists according to nature (legem naturalem) and a nature that exists according to law (naturam legalem). But also in the earlier part of the letter, affirming that men and women have exchanged among themselves the natural use of their created condition (naturalem usum conditionis) for an unnatural one from the repayment of their error through the recompense of punishment, he clearly defends what is by nature (naturalibus). God himself we know first according to nature (secundum naturam), naming him God of gods, both assuming him to be good and invoking him as judge. Do you ask whether nature ought to be leader for us for enjoying his [i.e., God’s] arrangement of creation (conditioni)?–[Yes, it should,] in order that we may not be carried away by that violence by which the enemy (aemulus) of God has corrupted all ordered nature (universam conditionem), subjected to man for sure uses, along with man himself: whence also the apostle says that it, unwilling, fell victim to vanity, overthrown first by vain uses, then by shameful and unrighteous and ungodly ones. Thus, therefore, likewise in the pleasures of the shows (spectaculorum) has the natural arrangement of creation (conditio) been disgraced by those who perceive that all the things from which the spectacles are prepared belong to God by nature, indeed, but who are wanting in the knowledge (scientia) to understand the following fact as well: that all things have been changed by the devil. But in fact we have treated this material sufficiently on account of our play-lovers in a Greek work too. (On the Crown of the Soldier 6) 1